My home has been quiet this weekend because we’re mourning the loss of a most-loved pet. We’ve gone out a couple of times and spent some time at my girlfriend’s home to try to life some of the cloud of sadness that drifts through our house. I’ve been through loss before, I know the steps of grief and I’ll move through them eventually. I can see them laid out on the floor before me like adhesive steps in a dance lesson diagram. Right now I’m working on even believing that it happened. You would think that I would be eager to move on through this step but I’m afraid of those times when I forget for a while that she’s gone and look for her at the window or on her favorite cushion. Realizing she’s not there is like discovering her loss all over again. It’s tempting to hold it in my mind like a mantra, ‘she’s gone, she’s gone’, just to avoid that moment of realization.
Instead of doing that, I borrowed a book from my friend and read it through. It was Bee Season by Myla Goldberg. This is the author’s first published work and it’s an impressive effort. The story centers on the Naumann family and their daughter Eliza. She had been taken for a mediocre child and the academic father had invested his time in his older child, a son who seemed destined for rabbinical studies. When Eliza very nearly wins the national spelling bee, her father transfers his time, energy, and affection to his daughter. His son reacts by becoming detached from this already emotionally distant family and pursuing his own spiritual path in Eastern enlightenment. By the time his father awakens to the damage he has done to his son, the teen is embroiled with the Hare Krishna movement and ready to become a devotee.
Eliza’s mother has never been close to her family. She takes the opportunity of her husband’s obsession to fall ever deeper into her mania, using stolen objects to construct a kaleidoscope of objects that represent the perfect world.
Eliza welcomes her father’s help until he reveals that her spelling bee skills should open a pathway for Jewish mysticism and studies of the kabala. The girl engulfs herself in a spiritual journey that uses words and letters to seek oneness with God in the hope that her perfection of form and devotion will restore her family and win the approval her controlling father.
The story is engrossing and each character is finely detailed, remarkably so. Their history, desires, fears, and inner voice are laid bare for the reader and one can’t help but love each person, even while recognizing the damage they shaping each day. This is a story of obsession in many forms and the search for an overwhelming spiritual experience to substitute for the mundane quality of everyday life. But, even as the characters are laid out like a buffet dinner at Hometown Buffet, there’s still a quality of separateness in the book. I had the recurring feeling that I was sitting in the story, within touching distance of each person, and yet they never raised their eyes to look at me. This is the most inward story I’ve read. Perhaps it’s the terrible reserve of this family; they don’t speak of what is happening to them even while consumed by regret. The sharing of information is only accomplished in great pain, as a weapon in an argument spun out of control. This isn’t the normal reserve of a family trying to avoid another fight or the polite fictions that are maintained to keep love floating through the home. This family lives with tremendous secrets and a reserve that kills affection and confidence. The Naumann family is damaged long before mental illness and anger causes an obvious rift.
Reading this book is kind of frustrating because you can’t tell the father to knock on the door instead of standing in front of it uselessly. You can’t pull the daughter away from the father and tell her to protect herself from her father’s obsession with mysticism. What use to recognize that each person is using a form of OCD to escape from daily pain and that nurturing the habit won’t bring them closer to God because He doesn’t want ritual and mind-numbing repetition. It’s a frustrating book for all that it’s a well-written story with excellent depth and coloration. This story won’t leave you uplifted and won’t satisfy in many ways, but you will have experienced a very real family with terrible problems that engage your mind and heart. Read Bee Season by Myla Goldberg, published by Anchor Books.
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